City of Fort Dodge, Iowa

Dr. Catherine Stewart, Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at Cornell College will speak at the Fort Dodge Public Library on the life of Zora Neale Hurston author of "Their Eyes Were Watching God."

 

Dr. Stewart received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1999. Her thesis, "Native Subjects: 'Race' and the Rise of Ethnographic Authority in the Federal Writers' Project," received the prestigious University President's Award for Distinguished Doctoral Students. She is currently preparing her manuscript, "For the Record: Memory, 'Race,' and Nation-Building in the Federal Writers' Ex-Slave Project, 1935-41," for publication. She has presented her work at a number of conferences including the Black History Workshop at the University of Houston, the Northern Great Plains History Conference, and Yale University. This spring she will present her most recent work on African American writers and psychoanalytic discourse at the Northeast Modern Language Association's Convention and the American Association of Historians of Medicine's annual meeting. In 2005 she interviewed the humanitarian and social justice activist Stetson Kennedy about his work as Director of Folk Life Studies for the FWP in Florida back in the 1930s, and his memories of Zora Neale Hurston. A copy of this interview has been requested by the Folklife Division at the Library of Congress for their archival collection.